Wordsworthian ‘Nature-worship’ is so often assumed to be a harmless expansion of our poetic vocabulary whose absence now seems unthinkable, that we are in danger of forgetting how crucial the substitution of ‘Nature’ for ‘God’ was in atheist discourse. A roll-call of the great founding texts – On the Nature of Things, The System of Nature, The Ruins … to which is added, The Law of Nature, The Temple of Nature – may help us to reposition the coded significance of any heavy stress on this word at a time when the 1793 French constitution had recently been celebrated round ‘a colossal statue of the Goddess Nature, spurting water from her breasts into an ornamental pool, on the site of the Bastille’. At the same time, ‘Nature’ clearly also does have a place in Christian discourse, so long as it is seen as a series of signs of God's handiwork: hence such titles as Paley's Natural Theology; or, Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity, Collected from the Appearances of Nature. In many of his most striking uses of the word, Wordsworth is simply silent on any such signifying function; one of the greatest difficulties his work presents is in the interpretation of these silences.